Hooman Majd joins the Washington Journal to analyze the U.S.-Israeli operation in Iran as an actual war causing over 2,000 civilian deaths. He argues that while Trump and Netanyahu seek a "regime adjustment" rather than full change, military strikes have failed due to a lack of successors and loyal IRGC troops. Majd highlights Iran's defiant strategy to close the Strait of Hormuz, which Trump underestimated despite intelligence warnings, and addresses viewer concerns regarding the war's high financial cost and the collapse of Obama's nuclear deal. Ultimately, the discussion suggests the conflict stems from unmet diplomatic goals and miscalculated military expectations, risking broader regional chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
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Joining us now to talk about the U.S.-Israeli operation in Iran is Human Majid, author of Minister Without Portfolio, memoir of a Rakaltan exile, an author and journalist.
Thank you so much for being with us this morning.
My pleasure.
Thank you for having me.
So first, just give us what your thoughts are on what's unfolding in Iran, your home country.
Well, I mean, what's unfolding is what we see from the videos and the statements and the cell phone videos that we see on social media and on the nightly news, channels everywhere, is bombing.
I mean, the missiles are landing on people's heads.
Buildings are being flattened.
People are being killed.
It's a war.
It's an actual war.
I know President Trump calls it an excursion, but it's, I think he meant incursion, but it doesn't matter.
It's a war.
Pete Hekseth calls it a war.
He's the Secretary of War.
I think the Iranians consider it a war when they're being bombed and killed in some cases.
In many cases, actually, I think well over 2,000 at this point, dead Iranians, civilians.
So yeah, it's a war.
That's what's happening.
People are making do with what they can.
They're, you know, going shopping, when I say shopping, shopping for food, basically.
They are trying to live their lives as best they can.
And in the big cities, I mean, today is Nowruz, which is the Persian New Year, so it's a very important day.
Excuse me.
It also happens to be Eid, which for Muslims is a holy day.
It's a celebration of the last day of Ramadan.
So a double holiday in Iran, in a way.
And both are supposed to be celebratory, but they're not really.
People are going through the motions.
They're doing what you normally do on Nowruz, the Persian New Year.
But it's not a happy occasion.
So that's what's happening on the ground.
The people that I am able to communicate with my family inside Iran, yeah, they're all worried.
They're all sad.
They don't know what's next.
They don't know how long this war is going to go on.
They definitely believe the Iranian system is going to resist for as long as it can.
And the question is, how long will President Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu decide to prolong this war and continue to bomb?
Because they, you know, military targets, I'm not sure there are a whole lot left, as President Trump himself says.
So what's next?
Is it troops on the ground, which Iranians are worried about?
Is it bombing civilian sites, infrastructure, for example?
So that's what's going on right now as we speak.
And as in, you know, Iran is seven and a half hours ahead of us time zone.
They're approaching their evening.
And more bombs and more missiles.
You mentioned the system itself.
You wrote in the intercept earlier this month.
The headline is the regime change president who won't or can't actually change any regimes.
You said the Iran war shows that Trump is loving his military interventions, but they are never what he claims them to be.
You call it regime adjustments.
Explain what you mean.
Well, I think that's what, I mean, based on what President Trump himself has said, basically, it seems his preference is not to go through a complete regime change, partly, even if that's something that he may fantasize about that could happen organically without the U.S. doing very much.
I think he understands that a real regime change means putting boots on the ground.
And then a real regime change, to go from a completely different, from this regime to a completely different regime, has to mean that there is someone ready to take over.
I know that President Trump and this administration is not talking about a Iraq-style regime change where someone like Paul Bremer becomes the pro-consul and runs the country as an American.
So that's out of the question.
So it seems that his preference is an adjustment of the regime to be something more to his liking, sort of like Venezuela.
And he's actually said that.
And that's a regime adjustment.
It's not a regime change.
The military in Venezuela is still the same military.
The vice president is now the president, is the same person who was the vice president.
And, you know, the U.S. has good relations now with Venezuela.
Sanctions are being lifted.
I think that is the preference for, was the preference, at least for Iran.
It's kind of hitting sort of a bit of a roadblock here because, you know, Iran hasn't obliged by having someone come up and say, well, listen, I'll take over.
I'll be the person to, you know, or be the person to deal with President Trump and we will just keep the regime as it is, but we won't do this, that, and the other that President Trump doesn't like or doesn't want.
So that doesn't appear to be at all the goal at this point.
And saying to people who are being bombed, you should, you know, you should take over the government is unrealistic.
And I think the administration knows that's unrealistic.
I mean, to that point, I know you said that the Iranians that you talked to, including your family member, are scared specifically about whether or not boots will end up on the ground there.
The Washington Post had this interesting article earlier this week.
The headline is, Israel urges Iranians to revolt, but privately assesses they'll be, quote, slaughtered.
Israeli officials told U.S. counterparts they hope for an uprising, even though it would lead to a massacre, according to a State Department cable reviewed by the Post.
Do people in Iran feel that taking to the streets as President Trump have asked them to take over their country now that the leaders of the IRGC are being kind of taken out one by one?
Do they believe that that is a real possibility?
It's a real reality for them right now.
Not at this time.
No, not at this time.
Inside Iran, people do understand, people do believe that the regime needs to change.
When I say change, it doesn't necessarily mean a drastic change, like the Shah's son coming and taking over, but it needs to reform itself or it needs to change.
I mean, people have been protesting.
We know that.
That was in January, huge protests.
But that was before there was a war.
And people were going out and they were, you know, it started out as economic protests because people couldn't make ends meet with the economy the way it is, which is partly or largely because of sanctions and the collapse of the Iranian currency, the Riyal, and partly because of, you know, corruption and other mismanagement of the government.
So the protests started like that and turned into like, well, no, we want the regime to change.
So there's no question that there are many, many people in Iran who are deeply unsatisfied.
But at times of war, you know, they're not going out.
First of all, as you pointed out, the very cynical view of the Israeli government saying, go out and do this, but we know you're all going to get slaughtered, which I think people in Iran believe that they'll get slaughtered.
I mean, inside Iran, you see a very strong security presence on the streets for many reasons.
One being to prevent an uprising, if it was ever to occur, and also because they believe there are spies inside Iran, which They're right, there are, because otherwise, how is Israel taking out these top leaders in Iran without having deep intelligence inside Iran?
So the security presence is very strong in Iran.
The loyalty of the troops and the shock troops and the basij and the IRGC has not been challenged at all.
They are loyal to the system so far, at least.
We have to see if there's a ground invasion that might change.
But right now, there's no fracturing in the leadership.
And as each general or leader has been assassinated, he's been replaced almost immediately.
So they have a deep bench.
And right now, we're not seeing anything that would indicate that a revolution, let's call it a revolution, is possible.
And I don't think the Iranians inside Iran believe that it's possible.
They may desire it, or at least some portion of the population may desire a radical change.
Some would, I'm sure, even welcome, you know, the Shah's son to come in and take over.
But the Shah's son doesn't really have a ground operation inside Iran like Khomeini did in 1979.
He had every single mosque in the country, Khomeini did.
The Reza Pahlavi doesn't really have that in Iran.
He has an organization outside Iran in Washington, but that's it.
And then there's the MEK, who have an organization in Albania and in exile and some members inside Iran who can cause trouble.
They've assassinated people before, scientists over the years.
But again, they have no strength inside Iran and they are actually not particularly well liked, partly because they sided with Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s.
So there's, you know, Iranians sitting in Iran are, you know, that's why some of them did indeed welcome military strikes, because they're like, well, the only thing that's going to help us get rid of this regime is a war, or at least military strikes.
But as time has gone on and now we're in the third week and we're about to go into the fourth week of the war, I think even those people who originally welcomed some military strikes to, you know, we saw that there were some celebrations by some people, both outside and inside Iran when the supreme leader was killed, for example, and some of the top generals were killed.
But as time has gone on and people see the death toll and they see the destruction, they see some of their cultural heritage sites being damaged, some major cultural heritage sites being damaged, I think, you know, that that sentiment has dissipated.
And we've seen it from witnesses on the ground, Financial Times newspaper has someone inside Iran who's reported about that, about how people who initially welcomed perhaps some change in Iran at the leadership level, at least, if not a total regime change, are now kind of desperate.
It's like, this is not what we wanted.
We did not want you bombing our streets and killing people.
So yeah, I think that there isn't any sentiment that people could rise up and take over the government.
I mean, you kind of have to imagine if you're being bombed and missiles are falling on your head, that people tell you to go take over the government.
It's like, well, how?
What are we supposed to do?
Even if we are able to destroy this regime by sheer numbers of people going out on the street and the regime collapses, then what?
I mean, most people would have to ask, then what?
Who's going to take over?
Who's going to be the person to lead the country, form a government, and get things back to normal for people?
Because it's definitely not normal now.
Speaking of government, your family has had previous ties or has had ties to previous governments in Iran.
Can you elaborate on that?
And just, you know, I know we talked a bit about the reaction of people on the ground there, but what is the mindset of Iranian officials inside Iran right now?
Well, it's defiance.
The mindset of Iranian officials inside Iran is absolute defiance.
Yeah, my family, like many other Iranian families, my father was an ambassador under the Shah in the 70s.
His career in the foreign office was from the 1950s through the revolution in 1979.
I had an uncle who was a deputy prime minister under the Shah, and also another ambassador as well.
And then after the revolution, like many families in Iran, because the revolution was very popular, some members of my family on one side of my family were for the revolution, were pro the revolution.
You know, over the years, some of them have perhaps regretted it.
Some of them are still for a republic and not for a Shah and maintain that.
Some of them are very religious.
But yeah, like many Iranians, we have family on all sides of the political spectrum, all the way from communist to right-wing, extreme right-wing people.
And that's not unusual when you have a country that has gone through a major, major revolution, a complete turning upside down 2,500 years of monarchy and what people are adjusted to in terms of just thinking that's it.
Iran always has a king.
It's always had a king for 2,500 years.
I mean, how could we change that for the people who are still monarchists and want a monarchy to return?
So, yeah, but inside Iran, I mean, the defiance by the regime leadership right now is pretty clear.
They said after the 12-day war in June of 2025, the last time Iran was attacked, that, you know, we held restraint here.
We didn't go crazy when he fired some missiles into Israel, fired some missiles on an American base in Qatar, and then the war stopped.
There was a ceasefire.
But they did say if we're ever attacked again, this is going to be a regional war.
We're going to go after everybody.
Anybody, American bases in the region, that's where they launched their war against us.
We're going to go after those.
And they have.
So when President Trump says, you know, nobody knew they were going to do that or hit Qatar or hit Bahrain, well, they said it very publicly.
The supreme leader of Iran at the time, the now deceased supreme leader, actually wrote it on February 1, I believe, or the beginning of February on Twitter, that if we're attacked again, it's a regional war.
The Cost of War Escalation00:13:16
And that's what they've delivered, because I think the leadership considers this war existential.
And, you know, in an existential war, you go all out and do whatever you can to have the upper hand, if not to win the war, because Iran knows it can't win a traditional war against the United States or even Israel.
Militarily, both countries are so far more powerful, so more superior, so far superior to Iran's military prowess that they can't win a traditional war.
But what they can do is they can cause a lot of pain.
So they're causing that pain in the hope that they have the upper hand at the end of the war, whenever that end comes.
And that's what they're illustrating and that's what they're saying publicly.
You know, the Straits of Hormoz, which is everybody's talking about, the ships aren't going through because of the threats of a missile attack by Iran.
They're not actually, they haven't mined it yet.
They haven't done anything yet.
But the ships don't want to traverse the oil-carrying ships, don't want to traverse the straits because of the danger that a missile will hit.
A couple of ships have been hit in the last three weeks.
So there's this bottleneck at the Straits of Hormoz, and Iran intends to keep that.
So I think they're trying to do their best to extend how they can resist this onslaught from Israel and from the United States, so that at some point, one or the other or both get tired of this war and realize that they can't change the regime and the regime is not going to give up.
It views this as an existential war.
And so then, you know, they hope that President Trump will feel the pain and the Persian Gulf Arabs are feeling the pain and they will put pressure on the U.S. and on Israel to end this war so that they don't continue to get attacked.
I want to ask you quickly before we turn to some phone calls, because obviously the President and the Department of Defense have touted just what a military success they believe these strikes to be, that they have really rendered Iran unable to fire off most of their missiles, 90% they say they're firing less than the start of the war, have struck over 100 of their Navy vessels and kind of those statistics like that.
But to your point, Iran is still able to strike, I mean, to launch missiles every once in a while.
They obviously have control of the Strait of Hormuz.
Do you believe that the president underestimated Iran's capacity in this way, not in the maybe traditional military way, as you said, but in their ability to kind of wreak chaos in the Middle East?
I believe so.
I mean, I don't believe the intelligence agencies inside the United States or even the Mossad may have, I don't believe they underestimated, but they've known that this could happen.
As I said, Iran telegraphed it that this is what we're going to do.
We knew that they had all these missiles, that they had built all these launchers and missiles underground.
I think, yes, I think at the end of the day, when President Trump made the decision, when he said he had this feeling that this is the right time to do this, that he probably ignored those intelligence briefings that said, yeah, this is what could happen.
Iran could close the Straits of Hormuz.
They could retaliate against the Emirates.
They could hit Qatar.
They could hit Bahrain.
So I doubt very much that the intelligence agencies were telling President Trump that, no, no, everything's going to be fine, two, three days, and we're done.
I'm sure they gave him all those alternatives that could happen, but he chose to underestimate, to believe that the power of the United States, the incredible military power of the United States, and having just done this in Venezuela, would prevail.
And all those warnings understood, but he didn't think, obviously, he didn't think that this was going to come to what it is today.
All right, let's take some phone calls really quickly.
Craig from Iowa and Independent, you're next.
Morning.
First off, I want to say I love the platform that Washington Journal provides the people.
I love to hear the cross messaging from everybody in the United States that participates.
Now, here's my point.
I'm against the spending.
I like to always say the only thing worse than a tax and spend Democrat is they don't tax and still spend Republicans like Trump.
How are we going to pay for all of this additional money?
We got a $1 trillion budget this fiscal year.
We've got a projected request for $1.5 trillion in defense spending in the 2027 budget.
And now we're going for $200 billion for supplemental spending.
Now, once we open this door, this door is wide open.
It will continue.
Trust me.
One thing that I think of is when Trump came into office, Elon Musk started the Doge program.
Who is one of the few entities in Washington that he didn't touch?
That was defense spending.
They had nothing to do with defense spending.
And in my opinion, that's one of the biggest areas of fraud spending, overspending, and waste and abuse than any other department in our government.
All right, Craig, I'm going to let him then get into this.
Yeah, I mean, I think, I mean, he's right.
Craig's right.
The cost is huge.
There's also human costs.
If you don't care about Iranians dying in this war, you should actually care about Americans dying in this war, which was a war of choice.
When we have wars of choice and Americans die, I think the families and the American public deserve to know why they died.
Now, the cost of the war, yeah, it's incredibly high.
You know, an F-35 fighter jet didn't, it sort of crash-landed, and the pilot is apparently safe yesterday.
And it was hit apparently by fire inside Iran, from inside Iran when it was flying over.
Which would be the first time that that's happened in this conference.
Yes, and CNN confirmed this, and the plane is an $80 million plane.
Is it a loss?
I don't know.
Can they repair the plane?
I have no idea.
But we've lost other planes.
We've lost tanker refueling jets that cost, I think, anywhere from 30 to 40 million each.
So all this money, yes, there's 200 million additional money, but it's going to keep going depending on what we do.
And then the human cost is going to keep going up because, as I said, if there's a ground invasion, or even if it's not an invasion, if the United States wants to open, let's say, clear the Straits of Hormoz so that ships can pass, the United States would have to station troops on the southern border of Iran near the strait so that they could eliminate any threat that emerges from Iran.
Well, that means they would be sitting ducks for the Iranian army, Iranian military.
So the cost is going to be massive.
And yeah, as far as Americans are concerned, I mean, you know, your gas bill is up.
Obviously, we know that.
And, you know, inflation is probably going to go up and food prices are going to go up.
I mean, where do truckers in this country, you know, buy their gas to move, you know, perishables across the country?
Yeah, those prices are going to go up if the war continues.
And I don't think, you know, the government is wrong when it says if the war ends, things will go back down.
Yeah, but it will take a very long time.
I don't remember when gas prices suddenly went from, let's say, $4 a gallon to $2 a gallon.
It doesn't happen overnight.
It takes a long time.
So in the meantime, Americans are going to pay the price of this war of choice.
And we call it the Defense Department.
They changed it to the War Department, which is very appropriate because that's what we're doing.
We're going to war.
So we're not defending America.
We're going to war.
All right.
Brenda from Buffalo, New York, a Democrat.
Hi.
Hey, I just want to know.
Trump's first year, he traveled the world making deals threatening that we won't do trade with countries and the tariffs.
And Venezuela, he took out Maduro, but the person that's running it now was the vice president, whose guest is bad.
But Iran has not built any nuclear bombs.
And 47 years, they've been threatening us.
I mean, no, they haven't.
They've been doing their own thing.
And Obama, he returned the money that was their money that we were holding from them and made a deal that they will never make nuclear bombs.
And they have it.
I just don't understand.
I mean, what's the beef with Iran?
And now Trump is next.
And he needs to stop.
And he needs to come back to America and work here.
And ICE and Border Patrol.
All right.
I'm going to let Human get in there and answer that part of the question, Brenda.
Go ahead.
Sure.
I mean, Brenda's right.
I mean, President Obama did make a deal with Iran, which was working.
Everybody agrees that it was working, except for Donald Trump and some other Republicans who believe, even if it was working, that it wouldn't work for the long term because it had sunset provisions where, you know, 10 years and 15 years later, Iran would be free to do whatever it wanted.
But, you know, 10 years, 15 years later, you could make another deal or extend the deal.
But if it was working at the time and there was no chance that Iran could build a bomb secretly or openly, President Trump chose to tear it up partly, I think, you know, it's my opinion, because it was Obama's deal and he wanted a better deal, as he says.
As he said, he wants a better deal.
He was going to make a better deal.
But he never really pursued a better deal.
He did the opposite.
Iran was negotiating in the second term anyway.
Iran was negotiating with him when we bombed them in June, right in the middle of negotiations, and did it again in the middle of negotiations in February.
So it doesn't appear that he really wanted to make a deal that would prevent Iran from ever building a nuclear weapon.
And Iran had, as far as I know, and according to all the reports in the media, Iran had presented a proposed deal that would have been much better than the deal for America, than the deal that Obama was able to make in 2015 and 16.
So, you know, it's confusing why the president chose to go to war right when he was presented with options that would have been easier and would have cost a lot less in both human terms and in terms of financial terms.
So yeah, it's puzzling why wars of choice are puzzling, always puzzling.
Why do we go to war?
Venezuela, I don't know if Del Codrigas is worse than Maduro, but I don't think President Trump cares about that.
He certainly doesn't appear to care about it.
He said on Iran, he said many times he'd be happy to work with someone from inside the regime.
So yeah, it's bewildering.
All right.
Quickly, Human, what else are you watching for in the next two weeks or so?
Well, I'm watching for an escalation.
I think Iran is unlikely to escalate or be able to escalate much further than it already has by bombing, for example, sending missiles into Saudi Arabia or hitting the gas field in Qatar yesterday, which President Trump, which was in reaction to Israel hitting Iran's gas field, Iran's share of that gas field and natural gas field.
And President Trump, as we know yesterday, said that that wasn't going to happen anymore.
He sounded like he didn't like the idea that Israel had done that and Iran's reaction to that.
So, I doubt there'll be escalation on that level, but the escalation from the United States, I think, you know, how does Trump get out of this war if he wants to get out of this war?
As I said, we're going into the fourth week next week, and four weeks of war when it was supposed to be a few days and easy in, easy out.
You know, it's not happening.
So, there has to, somebody has to come up with an off-ramp.
The off-ramp could be President.
Okay, we're running out of time, so we got to leave it there.
Human Majid, author of Minister Without Portfolio, Memoir of a Reluctant Exile.
Shop C-SPAN for Civic Gear00:02:02
Thank you so much for being with us this morning.
My pleasure.
Thank you, Jasmine.
We have Yankton, South Dakota.
Hello?
Yes, sir.
Get out of C-SPAN.
Go ahead.
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Gear up for engagement.
Next, former U.S. National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent, speaking about his decision to resign from his position over the Iran War.
In his remarks, Mr. Kent says, I will not, in good conscience, send young men and women off to die on foreign battlefields.
He spoke during the third annual Catholic Prayer for America gala in Washington, D.C. All right, Joe.
First of all, thank you for your service to the country's six bronze stars.
And honestly, most importantly, your family suffered from